Deborah Denno comments to The Guardian on how Wyoming has become the latest death penalty state to consider a return to the firing squad, while Tennessee’s governor has signed a bill to bring back the electric chair, amid a scarcity of lethal injection drugs and legal battles over the secrecy that surrounds their purchase and use by jurisdictions that impose capital punishment.
Deborah Denno, a Fordham University specialist in execution methods, said that the surge of interest in alternative processes such as the firing squad was partly a result of mounting unease about the lethal injection in the US. Last month the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, in which he took 43 minutes to die and writhed and groaned on the gurney, caused a wave of nationwide revulsion.
“There have been botches after botches using lethal injections – and those are only the ones we know about. Death penalty states have created the facade that there is something medical going on in the death chamber, that they are putting people to sleep when in fact prisoners are paralysed and could be tortured.”
Denno has studied the history of the firing squad in the US, and found that in most of the cases in which it was used it was relatively quick and effective. In 1938, a “human experimentation” was carried out on a 42-year-old inmate who was executed by firing squad, with his heart monitored using electrocardiograph tracing. The results showed that his heart was electrically “silent” within a matter of 20 seconds.
Read the entire Guardian article.